As a religious Jew with several atheist friends, I’ve often wondered why God created people who are “tone deaf” when it comes to God. Recently, while speaking to these friends, I realized three ways in which they, uniquely, make the world better.
Most of us religious people have historically been intellectually lazy. Why is there an earthquake? Because God wanted one. Where did we come from? From Adam and Eve, created by God of course. The scientific (often: atheist) mind rejects these explanations: “No, but really, what mechanism causes earthquakes? Let me now devote my life to finding out!” God wants us to figure out the wondrous laws He set up in creating and sustaining our world. We need atheists to work hard so all of us can recognize how wondrous and complex the world really is.
(I realize that Darwin was religious, and that some scientists are religious. But to create the enlightenment and modern science, and to sustain this as a culture and worldview, where people devote their lives to figuring out how things work, we needed atheists.)
Atheism is a useful framework sometimes. I’ve had fun with the thought experiment: what if we live in a simulation. What if someone just created a videogame and we are its characters. The most religiously troubling part of this line of thinking is: what if the creator of this simulation we’re all in is just another being, living in a world of similar beings, and perhaps is herself part of a simulation run by someone else? Monotheism becomes a lot less rational in a multiverse of simulations. To this my response is the same as the atheist’s response: is there any evidence that this exists? No. Therefore, there’s no reason to be bothered by this possibility.
As Rabbi Sacks zt”l mentions, sometimes religious institutions fail morally, and we need those skeptical outside voices to hold religion to account.
As an aside, we think of miracles as being “supernatural,” but my atheist friend Emily made an excellent point. If miracles were proven (for example, if we had a modern day version of revelation at Mt. Sinai or the splitting of the Red Sea), they would no longer be considered supernatural. They would become part of the scientific corpus. This is why I can imagine a future where even the most skeptical atheists believe in God.